iPhone contacts back-up?

Hi Roaminggnome, thanks for your reply. I have 300 contacts on my computer and only about 50 of these are on my phone. I don't want the other 250 on my phone. So I keep them separate. I don't use any cloud service except for Dropbox just to share files, and not for storage or back-up. Call me old fashioned, but I don't want to store anything on the cloud permanently.

Thanks for the link Javaliga. I will look into that. 🙂

Thanks SergZak. That's really helpful. 🙂

As an aside..... Hello Apple, I'm trying to reply individually to each of the people who replied to my post. I've posted 2 replies and now I have to wait to post this one having been notified: "Post limit reached. Please try again in a few moments". Surely this website can determine between a user replying to responses to the user's own post, and someone trying to spam the site?

Thanks Jolieteddie!

Thanks Rysz. Proper methods aren't the same for everyone. To cut a long story short, I have confidential research data on my computer, and I use a Chinese social media app known to be monitored by the Chinese government (and even some Chinese friends don't trust the software itself). I simply keep my phone and my computer separate. I email photos from my phone to my computer. I still use an iPod for music. I don't want to sync the contacts on my phone and those on my computer anyway. I try to keep my phone use to a minimum. Better for my eyes and my posture. So, I have no reason to sync and several good reasons not to.

Thanks for the link. That will be useful.

Thanks SergZak.

I am trying to click on "This solved my question" (which is the weirdest grammar ever), but for some reason the Apple site is not allowing me to do that. Well, I click on it but nothing happens.

The "My Contacts Backup" app worked out great. Thank you! Strangely I emailed it to my gmail and hotmail addresses. At first I used the gmail link and it didn't work properly. All contacts were 'uneditable'. Tried again and the same problem. Then used the Hotmail link and it worked fine.

However, at first I tried iCloud, having tried to sync only my phone's contacts to iCloud. It did not work. It just downloaded 3 contacts that were on my computer. This is where it gets ugly. I bought a new MacBook 2 months ago and was sure I had switched off iCloud when I set it up. No intention to use iCloud. But for some reason it was still running and 3 new contacts on my MacBook downloaded to my phone. But the iPhone > iCloud upload had not done anything. Oh well. "My Contacts Backup" worked out fine. Now I have totally signed out of iCloud on my computer.

BUT.... I just opened my calendar on my MacBook and it has disappeared. Everything has gone. I can only assume it disappeared with the iCloud Contacts experiment on Friday night. Argh! Syncing things is all very well if you want to. But there is an assumption that everyone wants to, and it seems too easy to make a mistake if you don't want to. Or if you want to be selective. Doesn't seem like intelligent technology if it assumes I want to overwrite a calendar that goes back 7 years with an empty calendar.

I've just been looking on my Time Machine back-up from Friday afternoon... Please can anyone tell me where I find the Calendar files so I can restore them?

Thank you!!